Last week, I learned even more about the Biker Lifestyle, and as usual, I learned it through trial and error. Emphasis on “error.”
It all started when one of Bob’s Facebook-using biker buddies made an offhand comment to the effect that Bob has had the same profile photo up for roughly 2,000 years and that it was time for a new one.
So I set out in search of a new photo. “Bob on the bike” seemed like an obvious choice, since the previous profile picture had been taken before Bob purchased his new Harley.
Now, most social-networking profile image areas are square in shape, even though most cameras do not produce square photos. (Take note, idea hamsters at Facebook – rectangular thumbnail images are a better idea than that new “Live Feed/News Feed” thing.)
So I found a cool image of Bob and the bike that I knew he really liked, fired up my image-manipulation software, and set to work with the “crop” tool. Once I had it cropped closer to a square, I started thinking. The image on my screen was big. The thumbnail images on profiles are small. Bob’s head was going to be about two pixels wide. What kind of profile pic is that? No one can see his face!
So, I cropped in on Bob, leaving enough of the bike in there so you could still tell he was on a motorcycle, like this:
Which, apparently, is where I made my grievous mistake.
“So, did everybody like your new profile photo?” I asked Bob that night, after it had been uploaded for a few hours.
“They’re making fun of me!” he said. “Everybody’s all like, ‘hey, nice handlebars.’”
“But if I don’t crop in on the bike, you can hardly see your face!”
“So?”
And with that, I learned something new about bike photography – it is never cool to crop out any part of a bike, even if it makes sense editorially, even if not doing it relegates your human subject to a few lowly pixels in the background. Here’s Bob’s new (and, from a biker standpoint, improved) photo:
